Friday, November 21, 2008

Change is coming...and no, I'm not referring to the forthcoming change in Washington. I'm referring to Oracle Application Express.

Since the first supported release of Application Express (Oracle HTML DB 1.5), Application Express has been delivered as a supported feature of the Oracle Database, supporting database releases 9.2.0.3 and higher. So even though Oracle HTML DB 1.5 was delivered as a feature of the Oracle Database Release 10gR1, a customer could actually download it from the Oracle Technology Network, install it in their Oracle Database 9iR2 9.2.0.3, and be in a supported configuration.

For the forthcoming release of Oracle Application Express 3.2, which introduces Oracle Forms Conversion, the minimum database version will continue to be 9.2.0.3. But for Oracle Application Express 4.0, the minimum database version will be Oracle Database 10gR2 10.2.0.x - possibly even 10.2.0.4.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

It's pronounced "what's up, dog?"...or if you're a Cleveland Browns fan like I am, it's pronounced "what's up, Dawg?" (my thanks to Sergio for this play on words).

The conference of the German Oracle User's Groups, Deutsche Oracle-Anwendergruppe 2008 Konferenz + Ausstellung (DOAG), is happening Monday 01-DEC-2008 through Wednesday 03-DEC-2008 in Nürnberg, Germany. Here is the conference program in German and English. There are a fair number of presentations about Oracle Application Express, including mine about what's coming new in Oracle Application Express in 2009.

I'm looking forward to the entire conference. Maybe some of the local attendees can take us on a walking tour of the Nürnberger Christkindlesmarkt.

Maybe everyone else on the planet knew about OSWD other than me. Regardless, here goes...

My brother-in-law, Matt Wagner, recently asked me to help him with his Web site. This was an interesting proposition, because I have not invested that much time learning about proper Web design (I never had to - I'm a database guy and we always had Carl and Marc for that kind of stuff). So I took this as an opportunity to actually learn something and I embraced the challenge. My brother-in-law already had his domain name, and he had a rough idea about the layout and the content that he wanted to put on his Web site, but he didn't know the first thing about HTML or how to propagate this information out to GoDaddy.

The last conversation I had with Carl was a week ago and I wanted to get his feedback about what I had done with Matt's Web site. Here is what pointed Carl to. I was so proud of myself, having figured out how to make some practical use of styles and also my over-the-top use of the effects from MooTools. Let me tell you - Carl laughed and laughed. He said the colors were odd, there was no contrast with the font and the background, the effects were funny, and he encouraged me not to use Serif fonts ("just not in style"). He also told me, with a chuckle, that I should start practicing jQuery and forget MooTools.

Carl did point me to the Open Source Web Design site and told me to pick one. For someone like me, who is artistically and graphically challenged, this site is a wealth of excellent templates and ideas. Needless to say, my second attempt at this, which we're continuing to iterate upon, is much, much better.